Owner Of Amazon Buys Washington Post For $250m

 

The media industry was on Monday stunned with the sale of 80-year-old Washington Post, for $250 million (£163 million) to the billionaire founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.

 

Bezos, the chairman of the internet retail giant, will become the sole owner of the United States capital’s most prestigious news outlet, bringing to an end four generations of leadership by the Graham family.

 

Claiming to have a “fantastic day-job” Mr. Bezos, 49, said he would not interfere with the day-to-day running of the newspaper, whose exposure of the Watergate scandal led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

 

“The values of The Post do not need changing,” Bezos, who is worth some $23.2 billion (£15.1 billion), said. “The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners.”

 

The sale of the ink-andpaper home of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to one of the leading lights of the electronic media was hailed as a landmark moment in the history of American journalism.

 

However, the surprise purchase was completed by Bezos himself rather than Amazon, the website that has revolutionised bookselling and online shopping since 1994, which will play no part in the deal.

 

It completed a remarkable three days in which The Boston Globe and Newsweek, two other major United States’ media brands, were sold by their owners after multi-million- dollars losses since their heydays. Amid tough conditions for international media companies, The Washington Post has endured a sharp decline in circulation, falling by about seven per cent year-onyear, according to the latest figures.

 

The Washington Post company’s newspaper division, of which the Washington Post newspaper is the flagship title, has suffered a 44 per cent decline in revenues over the past six years.

 

While continuing to win a string of Pulitzer prizes, it has in recent years closed all of its regional bureaux across the United States, while also making reductions to the number of its foreign correspondents overseas.

 

Media commentators were quick to draw comparisons between the price accepted for the newspaper and those attracted by recent new-media upstarts such as Instagram, the online photosharing service, which sold for $1 billion (£650 million) to Facebook last year.

 

Donald Graham, the company’s chief executive, said that interest from Bezos had softened his family’s staunch opposition to selling the newspaper that it has led for 80 years.

 

“We wanted to do more than survive,” said Graham, whose mother Katharine was publisher in the Watergate era. I’m not saying this guarantees success but it gives us a much greater chance of success.”